To rush over dark waters,
A swift bird with cruel talons;
To seize life—
Your life for her—
To hold it,
Hold it struggling—
To kiss it.
II
Crystal self-containment,
Giving out only what is sent.
Startled,
The circumference retreats
As it mounts higher, flamelike,
Still and clear without radiance,
Ascending without self-explanation.
A skeleton falls apart
With the dignity of comprehensible pathos,
The bones bleached by denial.
III
With the impalpable lightness of May breezes
Begins a battle of flower petals:
Cowering in the primrose whirlwind his lips have blown,
The little grotesque with the shattered heart,
Fearful,
Yet sinister in his fearfulness.
THEODORE DREISER
The man body jumbled out of the earth, half formed,
Clay on the feet,
Heavy with the lingering might of chaos.
The man face so high above the feet
As if lonesome for them like a child.
The veins that beat heavily with the music they but half
understood
Coil languidly around the heart
And lave it in the death stream
Of a grand impersonal benignance.
PIETA
The child—
Warm chubby thighs,
Fat brown arms,
An unsurprised face—
Cries for jam.
The mother buys him with jam.